The gang’s all here! On the scene from TechCrunch are Darrell Etherington, Drew Olanoff, Frederic Lardinois, Ryan Lawler, and yours truly (Greg Kumparak). Also on the scene: pretty much everyone in the world, judging from the line outside.

“Most of us have lived through an incredibly amazing revolution. It started back in the 80s. But if you look back, the vast majority of people were on one OS: Windows. But if you look back about 7 years, there’s been an explosion of devices. “

“We are very very fortunate at Google to have two different platforms. Two amazing, scalable platforms. Android and Chrome. Android started with a simple goal of bring open standards to the mobile industry. Today, it’s the most mobile popular in the world.”

Let’s talk about android: 2 years ago, we announced that we had over 100 million activations. A year ago, it was 400 million activations. The momentum has been breathtaking so far. Lets take a loot at where we are. [Sundar cuts to a video..]

3rd new api: Activity recognition. The new api will let your apps recognize if you’re driving, walking, or biking, and allow them to adjust accordingly. It’s done in a “very battery efficient” way, no GPS required.

The next Google Play Game service: a comprehensive multiplayer service, which can automatically match players, as well as handle “all of the hardcore data” work involved with building a multiplayer game

Hugo drops into a multiplayer demo of Riptide 2. He invites two friends into the game over Google Plus, dropping into an invite screen and just tapping their faces. It creates a lobby, automatically inviting everyone into the match. It’s really, really smooth.

It’s got all sorts of snazzy tricks than only Android developers can really appreciate: mentions of icons get a little preview in-line. When you’re building layouts, you can preview those layouts on the fly. You can also view those layouts on all sorts of different device form factors and sizes.

First up: optimization tips. It’ll automatically analyze your app, and how it’s postured in the app store. Don’t have any tablet integration? It’ll nag at you until you do. Got a bunch of russian users, but haven’t translated your app into russian yet? It’ll point that out.

Google sends your apps text to a translation service, and automatically adds them into your app when they’re ready. It’s not free — they didn’t mention pricing, but the prices on screen varied between $70 and $150 bucks.

“We know that a lot of you have invested a lot of time into building awesome tablet experiences. We’ll now let people browsing the top charts to surface apps that are specifically designed for tablets”

“But what if we gave you access to millions of tracks from the store? What if we got you right to the music, without any hassle? We built that service. Today we’re announcing Google Play Music: All Access”

“All Access starts with explore. It’s a guided way to browse a collection of millions of tracks. From the moment you enter explore, you get recommendations based on your listening preferences. You can also browse top playlists and charts, and selected content by our own music experts”

This app is quite friggin’ pretty. Queue management is particularly smooth. I didn’t think Rdio or Spotify had much to worry about here, but this app is probably the cleanest of the sort I’ve seen so far.

“This version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 will be available directly through Google Play, unlocked for both ATT and T-Mobile with LTE support, 16GB internal storage, bootloader unlocked, and it’ll receive prompt system updates with EVERY new release”

(In other words, this is the Galaxy S4 that everyone wanted to begin with)

“A lot of this new growth is coming from phones and tablets. We’re just beginning to push the mobile web forward. It’s in its early days, but we think we can do for the mobile web what we did for the desktop web.”

They’ve moved on to discussing their new image format, WebP. It meets or beats the quality of JPEG, whilst providing a 30+% reduction in file size. Plus, it “unfortunately” (their words!) supports animated images.

“Beyond just making web pages faster, we want to make things simpler and faster for users. One of the hardest things you can do on the web today is buy something. Currently, the process to buy something is 21 steps. The abandonment rate during the shopping process is nearly 97% percent”

Now, when you check out on a website in Chrome (including mobile), you’ll automatically be offered up a prompt with your billing profiles. It’ll auto-fill things like your zipcode, your address, your payment details. It turns that 21 step process into 3 steps.

Hah! There it goes. Whoa. It’s a racer game across multiple displays — each display makes up a different section of the track. Using web sockets and Google Play Services, it’s synced from device to device.

They’ve dropped into a video of the evolution of the web. It starts with a terminal, hackin’ away at CERN. It rolls through bbs; usenet; napster; it’s now showing things built on HTML5 and webGL. The web has gotten pretty!

“You’re not just shopping for yourself here. When you purchase an app, you just put in the name of the educational group you’re downloading for. Hit download, boom — that’s now on all 500 student tablets”

“We’re doing the heavy lifting, bringing these things to schools, making it easy for them to buy these tablets. Now it’s up to you, to build great educational content. We’ll start accepting k-12 apps this summer” Linkage: http://developer.android.com/edu

He shows a picture of an eiffel tower. No where in the post does it mention eiffel tower — but they’re doing image analysis, and it autotags it with an eiffel tower hash tag. He clicks the tag, the image flips, and a bunch of related content is on the back

“Since we’ve launched Google Plus, we’ve always backed up your photos. If you uploaded them at standard size, you had unlimited space. If you uploaded at full res, you had 5GB. This week, we announced that we’re bumping that up to 15GB”

When you upload, say, a vacation photo, Google can now take your entire collection — say, 600 photos — and automatically highlight the best. They’ll filter out duplicates. They’ll analyze for bad exposure. They’ll automatically identify major landmarks; they’ll look for people, and for photos of people smiling.

“Let’s talk about skin softening. I apologize — you’re going to see a gigantic photo of me in a second. We picked someone no one could get offended over.”

“We’re now able to deeply recognize the human face and skin. Where are the lines? Are they wearing jewelry? We can do something different for each and every section, like a professional would with a tool”

If you upload a bunch of photos that are clearly part of the same series, it’ll automatically turn them into a GIF. If they appear to be a panoramic series, they’ll combine it into a panoramic photo, server side. If you’ve got a bunch of photos of a group, but different people are smiling in each? They’ll stitch them together into a new photo and try to make sure everyone is smiling, automatically. Crazy.

“Growing up, I was obsessed with Star Trek. I was captivated by the future of technology it showed. A computer.. you could talk to? And it would answer? I dreamt of building that computer. Little did I know that I’d actually grow up to be responsible for that.”

“Today, I’m happy to announce that you’ll start to get important statistics, provided by the knowledge graph. Right now, you can search for the population of india; beginning today, we’ll anticipate what you’re likely to ask next: what’s the population compared to other countries? Today, we’re also launch knowledge graph in new languges: polish, turkish, and simplified/traditional chinese”

Up next, Anticipation. They’re moving into Google Now: You’ll now be able to set reminders within Google Now. Google Now will also highlight public transport details (such as line closures relevant to you), and recommend content that it thinks you’ll like when it’s released

“Now, lets fast forward to my trip to Santa Cruz. I don’t know if my kids are tall enough to ride the Giant Dipper roller coaster. I could walk over and find out.. by why not just ask Google? Okay Google — How tall do you have to be to ride the giant dipper?”

“Just recently, we launched user generated maps. Our most recent country: north korea. Before, our coverage of North Korea was just this big blank canvas, with a river down the middle. Now, it’s full of streets and points of interest”

Brian is discussing all of the data they’ve got, above just maps and street view. Their imagery — from streets, to the depths of the great barrier reef. Their local data, tacked on top of their 3D building imagery.

Visually, the new Maps for mobile isn’t dissimilar from what you’ve grown used to. It’s a pretty, full screen map view. But then he searches for “Burmese Food” — a listing for SF’s Burma Superstar pops up, with ratings from your friends prioritized.

If you search for “sushi” in san francisco, it drops icons on every sushi bar in the area. From there, though, you can limit it to just the restaurants that your friends have reviewed, or that top experts have reviewed.

Sometimes, it’s tough to label every road on a map — they’re just too small. If Maps knows that you’re interested in a location that exists on one of these small roads, though, it’ll now adapt the map on the fly, highlighting the names of those tiny roads and exaggerating them a bit.

They’re showing the new directions experience — it’s still completely full screen, with directions appearing in a lil’ pop up in the upper left of the screen.

One neat twist: they’ll now show public transit alternatives as potential routes by default, and have built a *REALLY* gorgeous new scheduling view to encourage people to use public transit more. I’m going to use the hell out of that.

“As Brian talked about earlier, we’ve collected a ton of imagery. My friends from Rome insist that the next time I’m there, I visit them. Lets take a lot. He zooms down to a 3D view of st peter’s basilica. He pans around the building, showing it from every angle.. then drops into the building itself, clicking through a 3D photo tour that’s automatically generated from user uploaded photos”

He zooms waaaaay out, showing the entire world. The clouds above? All rendered accurately, in real time. All of that crazy stuff you saw in Google Earth a year or two ago? Thats in Google Maps now, right in the browser.

He’s telling a story of traveling across the country to a robotics conference to his dad, remembering how his dad argued (successfully) to get him into the conference though he was too young. “We need to be fighting to get people into technology.”

“And yet, we’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity. Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist”

“Sergey and I talk a lot about cars. He’s working on automated cars now. Imagine how those will change our lives, and the technology landscape. Fewer cars, more space, fewer hours wasted behind the wheel of a car. The average american spends 50 minutes — five zero— commuting. Imagine if we got those hours back.”

Q: Are we ever going to see the web become the mobile operating system?

“We’re really excited about the web, being birthed from it. We’ve invested a lot into open standards. I’ve personally been quite saddened by the industries behavior surrounding such things. Take chat, for example. We’ve kind of had an offering forever that would interoperate crossplatform with anyone… yet its only this week that someone like Microsoft has embraced it.

We try to be practical, but also look at what other people are doing.”

“I wouldn’t grade the industry well on where we’ve gotten to. I don’t think developers should have to worry about things like ‘Should I develop for this platform, or another?’. You should be able to operate at a much higher level.”

A: “This is the area where business gets interesting. We pretty clearly have a strong desire for freedom of speech, for free flow of information…. We’re working very hard on that, trying to protect your private information, ensuring computer security, and trying to protect your freedom of speech as part of that. We try to be as transparent as possible about the requests we get from governments.”

Q: Can you talk about future projects regarding physical world initiatives?

A: Google X is focused on real atoms and bits. Sergey is having a really great time doing that. The possibilities of some of those things are incredible. Applying technology to transportation — that’s barely started. Our self-driving cars are just one thing [we’re working on there]

I encourage companies to do more things that are a little bit out of their comfort zone. Even when we do something that’s kind of crazy.. like self driving cars.. that map technology you just saw? The technology for self driving cars is the same. We had a bunch of engineers move over from one project to the other, and it was totally natural.

Gmail when we launched it, we had 100 employees at the company. People said we were crazy — and now, it was a really great thing we did that. Every time we do something crazy, we make progress.

A: A lot of people say that. I don’t think that’s the case. It’s totally under your control. You can’t really aruge that doing a bad job of returning whatever someone wants is the right way to educate someone. We’d rather you used that time to explore, reading the news, or books, or other things.

Q: You mention that people are too negative. This is something I want to focus on, to make the world more positive. How do we do that?

A: Yeah that’s a really good question. I think people are naturally concerned about change. We’re changing quickly, but not all of our institutions, like some laws, aren’t changing with that. The laws [about technology] cant be right if it’s 50 years old — that’s before the internet. Maybe more of us need to go into other areas to help them improve and understand technology.

We don’t want our world to change too fast. But maybe we could set apart a piece of the world .. I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can change new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

“Why are people keeping their medical histories so private? The answer is probably insurance. You’re very worried that you’re going to be denied insurance. That makes no sense. We should change the rules around so they have to insure people. That’s the whole point of insurance.”

Q: What can we do to encourage more women in the development community?

A: Sergey and I spent a lot of time interviewing women with exactly that in mind. We didn’t want our company to be all men. We have to be starting early, getting young girls excited about technology. If we do that, we’ll more than double the rate of progress we’re seeing in technology

Q: Can you discuss Google’s plan to bring the developing world online?

A: One of the things I’ve always talked about with the company is that smartphones are going to be, basically, amazing in this places. You don’t see them going into India or Africa because they’re just too expensive. We need to get them to $50, $100. We’re quickly getting to those levels. In 2 or 3 years, the smartphones we’re using today will be all over these countries.

Alriiiight. After a solid 3 1/2 hours of live blogging excitement (MY FINGERS HURT), I think we’re just about done here. If you enjoyed the show, gimme a shout on twitter here. Oh, and be sure to thank Darrel for the amazingly speedy photos!

Alriiiight. After a solid 3 1/2 hours of liveblogging excitement, I think we’re just about done here. If you enjoyed the show, gimme a shout on twitter here. Oh, and be sure to high-five Darrell for the amazingly speedy photos!

Alriiiight. After a solid 3 1/2 hours of live blogging excitement (MY FINGERS HURT), I think we’re just about done here. If you enjoyed the show, gimme a shout on twitter here. Oh, and be sure to high-five Darrel for the amazingly speedy photos!